To begin my story properly, I must go back to the time when the Empress
Eugenie had not started the vogue of the crinoline, when the Indian
Mutiny had not stained the pages of history, and the Crimean War was as
yet but a cloud the size of a man's hand on the horizon of the
world that is to say, to the very early fifties.

It was then that a little girl child was born into the world, a little
girl who was called by the name of Regina, and whose father and mother
bore the homely appellation of Mr. and Mrs. Brown; yes, plain, simple
and homely Brown, without even so much as an "e" placed at the tail
thereof to give it a distinction from all the other Browns.

So far as I have ever heard, the young childhood of Regina Brown was
passed in quite an ordinary and conventional atmosphere. Her parents
were well meaning, honest, kindly, well disposed, middle class persons.
According to their lights they educated their daughter extremely well;
that is to say, she was sent to a genteel seminary, she was always
nicely dressed, and she wore her hair in ringlets.

This state of things continued, without any particular change,
until Regina was nearly twenty years old. By that time the great
Franco Prussian War had beaten itself into peace, the horrors of the
Commune of Paris had come and gone, and the sun of Regina Brown's
twentieth birthday rose upon a world in which nations had come once
more, at least to outward seeming, to the conclusion that all men are
brothers... Continue reading book >>